Generative AI is seemingly becoming more and more entrenched in daily life, with built-in tools making it near impossible to avoid across platforms, not to mention the AI-generated content flooding apps like X, TikTok, and Instagram. At every turn, the technology’s critics have shouted their concerns from the rooftops, including the environmental havoc wrought by data centers to the damage AI can do to creative industries.
Now, that crowd has something to celebrate: the end of OpenAI’s video generation platform Sora.
On Tuesday, March 24, OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora, its AI-first TikTok clone, just months after its launch in September of 2025.
“We’re saying goodbye to Sora,” the company said in a statement. “To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.”
The news came as a surprise, especially given Disney’s billion-dollar investment in Sora in December, which came with a licensing deal that would allow Disney characters to appear in Sora-generated videos. With the end of Sora, that deal is off—and on social media, the party is on.
Cause for celebration
Sora was a controversial platform from its inception, with users quickly finding ways around the app’s guardrails to generate deepfakes of figures including Martin Luther King Jr. and Robin Williams, prompting outcry from their family estates. Even beyond legal and privacy concerns, Sora’s output was largely deemed “AI slop,” the kind that’s landed celebrities like Zara Larsson in hot water for reposting.
Sora’s shutdown marks the first time OpenAI has outright discontinued one of its tools. Coupled with the loss of Disney’s investment, social media users cautiously celebrated what looks like the first major hit to AI’s cultural dominance.
Folks across the internet declared that the so-called AI bubble is finally starting to pop, celebrating with SpongeBob memes and images of AI-generated fruits (a hallmark of TikTok’s most popular AI videos) thrown into blenders.
The metaphors didn’t stop at bubbles. Several users called Sora’s shutdown “the first domino to fall” in the end of generative AI, and one poster quipped, “This is like when you get a little 3.1 earthquake right before the one that gets a Wikipedia article.”
Not the end for AI
Sora’s closure may not be the sign of generative AI’s downfall that the internet makes it out to be. OpenAI may be shuttering Sora, but its flagship product ChatGPT has a staggering 900 million weekly active users. And in the broader AI industry, investors are still interested in funding new projects. That includes Disney, which said in a statement about Sora’s shutdown that it’s still looking to get in on the AI business.
“As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” a Disney spokesperson told outlets including The Hollywood Reporter. “We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.”
And as some users on social media pointed out, even if the bubble is starting to pop, generative AI will likely never be a thing of the past. “Lots of technologies that stuck around (including to the detriment of workers and society more broadly) start with overinvestment bubbles that pop, but they don’t go away,” one user wrote. “We need to legislate.”
